I remember checking into this hotel right around noon which was a little odd to begin with. Check-in was almost always an evening event. It was a first-floor room that didn’t smell quite right; this was not the Four Seasons. My car was just on the other side of the window. I recall a drastic temperature shift as I walked into the hyper-air-conditioned room after just minutes before being baked in raw one-hundred degrees sunlight. I think it was Texas.

I’m not sure how long it took me to notice that the far corners of the room were glowing with  light bouncing off the opaque plastic curtains. I was standing in semi-darkness when I decided to  get out a camera and take a picture. It was an odd transition. One minute, turned off by the artificially frigid darkness, to setting up a tripod trying to create art the next.

It was mysterious and simultaneously mundane; a strangely spiritual combination. The scene and my mood had been transformed by light—by radiation. The references to white glowing light are numerous in so many religions and had you been in that room it would have been easy for you to understand why. It was a powerful effect.

Somehow, in the span of a few minutes, I had come to see a slightly depressing side of our culture with new eyes. I had found beauty in a most surprising place. I was thinking that I must be surrounded by it, if only I would take the time to notice.  

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